Web conferencing services, such as Cisco's Unified MeetingPlace™ virtual meeting application and Cisco's WebEX™ web-based meeting software, have become prevalent in today's workplace. Such web conferencing tools eliminate the cost of travel and save valuable time. With increased collaboration among persons at multiple different locations, people need to continuously learn new names and faces, contributing to an ever expanding list of social or professional connections. However, conventional web conferencing tools are limited in the amount of information automatically available to a user (e.g., a meeting participant) about the other participants (e.g., what degrees the participant has earned, which schools the participants have attended, in which department the participants work, what published documents the participants have authored, etc.).
This kind of information can be very useful to the user to determine which participant has relevant expertise with regard to a context of a meeting and which participants may be more closely connected (e.g., socially or professionally) to the user. Even if such information was made available to the user, he would need to sift through the information to determine which information is relevant to the meeting context and what degree of associations the participants may have with the user. Furthermore, as the number of meeting participants increase, for example, in the case of large conferences with people from varying backgrounds, organizations, and countries (e.g., Worldwide Web consortium (W3C), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), or other technical and research conferences) and as the context of the meeting changes, it becomes an especially burdensome task for a user to make such determinations.